She visits him in hospital. She takes him back into her home. Romance rekindles. They touch, they cuddle, they smooch.

And now there's even tender talk of remarriage. Even the hardest heart should just feel the love.

But when the divorced husband is the recidivist thug Paul Gascoigne, and when the heroine is his ex-wife and professional victim Sheryl, all one actually feels is an overwhelming urge to slap her.

At least it would save him the bother.

It would be an understatement to say that she seems to be a sucker for punishment. Gascoigne, emotionally intemperate at the best of times, is by any standards way off the rails at the moment.

The once-brilliant footballer, a national hero in his heyday, has been involved in what are politely reported as 'incidents' so often in the past year that we have all lost count.

Twice in six months he has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, he has just completed one of many in-patient spells of treatment and is said to have been diagnosed with symptoms of addiction, paranoia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and even a form of Tourette's Syndrome.

Yet Sheryl apparently believes him to be a reformed man on the basis that - thanks to constant supervision, mark you, not self-control - he hasn't had a drink for, oooooh, weeks. So she opens her doors and it's: 'Hi, Honey! You're home!'

It is one of the last taboos of social commentary that we are not allowed, ever, to suggest that a battered wife has deserved her fate, let alone 'asked for it'. So I won't.

But when we extend that to prevent anyone saying that a battered wife does nevertheless have a responsibility for her own safety - and that of her children - it becomes a taboo too far. So I will.

Day release: fuelling speculation of a reunion, Gazza and Sheryl share a smooch after a trip to the cinema before he heads back to The Priory to continue his rehab

Sheryl Gascoigne has never lifted so much as her famously broken finger (he'd had a few drinks, he didn't mean it, obviously) to protect herself or, more disgracefully yet, her vulnerable children.

Paul's drunken, violent rages were not an unexpected, occasional one-off; they were the pattern of their relationship from the start.

Yet instead of scarpering while the warning bells rang loud and clear, what did she do?

In 1996, she not only married him, but she took into the marriage her two children from a previous marriage and even let him adopt them, stripping them of their real father's name to give them the already-tarnishing 'Gascoigne'.

What was she thinking? That becoming a family man would change him for the better?

She may as well have headed for the zoo and tried to rearrange the spots on a leopard; it would've been at least as clever. And just as safe.

For the next two years she hung on in there, first pregnant with Paul's child, then the mother of the infant Regan - and all the while her own terrified kids, Bianca, then nine and Mason, six, watched helplessly as their stepfather routinely beat the bejeezus out of their mum.

None of it had to happen. Sheryl wasn't a terrified young girl with nowhere to turn. And even if she had been, there are options.

Erin Pizzey, the redoubtable founder of the first women's refuges 40 years ago, pointed out earlier this week that there are now 500 such shelters - as well as a greatly enlightened police force waiting and prepared to help - and it is a woman's self-respecting duty to avail herself of them.

She's right. Women do have choices. And Sheryl Gascoigne has had more than most.

Yet not until she'd served several years of aggressive courtship and two more years of violent marriage did she go for the big prize: a divorce settlement worth millions - as well as the extra perk that she had clearly enjoyed all along, which we might generously call minor celebrity.

She played out her victimhood in public for all it was worth; she even dabbled with on-screen television try-outs, until the penny dropped and producers realised that neither marrying a footballer nor being knocked about by one actually meant you were any good.

Still, significantly, she held on to the Gascoigne surname - as did her daughter Bianca, although not even Gazza's flesh and blood, when she also took her shot at screen fame in the low-brow reality show Love Island.

Troubled: Paul Gascoigne's recent appearance has sparked huge concern among his friends and family

And now, ten years later, here comes Sheryl again: hurling herself back onto the front pages, back into the arms of the even more disturbed failed sportsman, back to instability, uncertainty and risk.

Well, you say, but so what? If the woman is missing the bandages, black eyes and split lips that she clearly thinks are a good look - it's up to her, isn't it?

Yes, if it were all about her, I suppose it would be. If it were all about her and some insatiable mania for sado-masochism, she could go three rounds with Max Mosley for all I care.

But domestic abuse is rarely, very rarely, just about the bully and the bullied.

Bianca, now 21, is said to be understandably anxious about Paul and Sheryl's reconciliation.

She, at least, has vivid memories of what it meant to be a child witness to horrors she had no power to stop.

Mason, three years younger, in his late teens, is at that age when role models are desperately important; we read daily about what happens to lads from homes where brute violence rules over reason. Regan, Paul's own child with Sheryl, is just 12.

Sheltered from the worst of it, as he has been, he loves his father and can't wait to see him march down an aisle once more.

But you can't be sheltered from reality for ever. And although it may not happen, if the palpably disturbed Gascoigne's fist were ever again to be raised in anger, however sorry he might be afterwards (they always are), what is the message Sheryl will have sent by putting her own 'needs' before her children's?

That this is just the way life is? The way we do things around here? Only to be expected?

And perhaps worst of all: what is the message she sends to other battered women, less mature, less independent, less well-off and far less able to make their escape than this attractive, wealthy, high-profile, self-selected victim?

That if you love him you'll forgive him? That it's always worth giving him one more chance?

Tell that to the grieving families of the two women, every week, who are killed by the men for whom they did precisely that.